


Test of Independence

by liquidCitrus



Category: Nobilis - Jenna Moran
Genre: Demigods, Explosives, Gen, Introspection, Nakama, No Romance, Philosophy, Road Trips, Semantics Arguments, Trust Issues, Urban Fantasy, bombing a building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-28 09:36:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20776424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liquidCitrus/pseuds/liquidCitrus
Summary: Corinne Idurre, Excrucian Warmain, is sitting at the shore of a lake when they find her. Notonthe shore, oh no, that would be an acknowledgement of the base reality they are inhabiting. But at the shore, hovering, tilted back like a lawnchair. She glances at them and languidly rolls a hand in the general direction of the four Nobles. “Is the package here?”“Jessie is not apackage,” growls Rostam.“Sure, sure, whatever.” Corinne rotates herself upright, still floating. She slinks behind Jessie and whispers something into her ear.Jessie whips around and elbows Corinne in the face. Her arm passes through the Excrucian’s smiling form like a knife through mist.An enemy advances a philosophical argument. Or a literal fight. Or both, because in this world they're one and the same.(This is intended to convey what a campaign of Nobilis is like. You do not need any specific knowledge of Nobilis to read this.)





	Test of Independence

**Author's Note:**

> This work is based on the 3rd edition of Nobilis, a tabletop roleplaying game by Jenna Moran.
> 
> Nobilis is a diceless, resource-based tabletop roleplaying game that usually features semantics arguments and philosophical disagreements.
> 
> This is intended to convey what a campaign of Nobilis is like. You do not need any specific knowledge of Nobilis to read this. In fact, you may find that reading this before reading the Nobilis corebook may help give much-needed context to parts of the book itself, since it is rather unclear about how all its elements come together.
> 
> However, this is not a fully worked example showing off the game mechanics. Large swathes of the system, such as mortal actions, Auctoritas/Strike, Imperial Miracles, and Destiny, are ignored entirely.
> 
> This work makes several compromises between “being a good work of fiction” and “being an example of play”. Most notably, the main characters being led by the nose into repeated confrontations with different Shards is largely there for showing off some diversity of approach and tactics.
> 
> A couple years ago I was in a Nobilis campaign, run by one [geostatonary](https://geostatonary.tumblr.com/), that was also about a Warmain that cut people away from what they cared about. Mine is aimed in a different direction philosophically, but I cannot ignore the extensive similarity of premise.

There is a war. Sometimes, it is called the Valde Bellum. Other times, it is called the Excrucian War. Or just the War. Whatever you call it, it is the fight to keep the soldiers of the void, the Excrucians, from destroying Creation.

The War has no front lines, no battle formations, no bases to strike. The enemies have infinitely beautiful porcelain faces, silver tongues, weapons of forbidden power. The territory they fight over is the Estates, the Platonic concepts that give form to the world. The battles are intensely personal; every Estate is also part of a living being, an Imperator, and destroying one irreversibly tears their domains from the world.

The Imperators fight this war with stories. The Estates themselves are platonic concepts, but the Imperators weave and blur the boundaries between them, making it terribly difficult to pick out where an Estate ends and another begins. But Imperators can only work miracles across vast expanses of time, and an Excrucian can strike a fatal blow in a day, and thus the Nobilis - mortals given fragments of the souls of gods - were enlisted to defend the universe.

The Nobilis fight this war with their blood.

* * *

The Wildlord Imperator Vitex is peculiar. His particular brand of absolute justice is for none to rule over another. The creation of his Nobles was born of necessity and the exigencies of war; had he a choice in the matter, he would have given all of himself away and unraveled into the wind. But as it is, all of his Nobles were allowed to choose whether they wanted a short life of struggle and glory instead of a long and uneventful life of peace, and all of them chose this.

A hill in a deep forest, then; and four of the foremost of the Nobilis upon it, in a circle. Jessie Durante, the Lady of Defiance, sitting in rare stillness. Su-Cheol Kim, Dominus Whistleblowing, idly expanding and collapsing the length of a metal staff. Myra Henderson of Anarchism, wary for whatever might be in the trees. And the Baron of Yoga, Rostam Escarra, hoping for someone to punch.

The note from Su-Cheol's Anchor had said that something would happen here. And indeed: the wind shifts, and a young man with eyes of night and falling stars emerges from the trees.

"Are you serious," says Jessie. "She sent a _shard_."

Su-Cheol sighs, and expands his staff to usable size. "Little one, would you kindly go and tell Corinne that if she insists on doing it this way, she could at least do the decency of making it a fair fight? Beating a mere messenger into a paste would be easy, and therefore pointless."

"I'm not a _messenger_," says the Shard, but even so, the nearby woods are suddenly bristling with spear-tips. Or the nearby woods have always been bristling with spear-tips, and it took until now for anyone to notice? It's hard to tell.

Myra's grip on her knife tightens. "Got any more surprises for us?"

The Shard shrugs. "You already know the answer to that question." He withdraws a corked vial from a pocket somewhere deep in his military jacket, and -

Rostam pounces, aiming to knock the vial from the Shard's hand. The Shard retaliates with a poke of two suddenly daggerlike fingernails towards Rostam's face. The fingernails skitter down Rostam's artificially toughened skin, leaving barely even a scuff, and the vial rolls out onto the grass as the Noble and the Shard struggle to gain purchase on one another.

Jessie scoops the vial up off the ground just in time for it to suddenly glow white-hot. She shrieks and throws it away from her. It breaks, letting out an eye-smarting cloud of smoke, flat black and far too thick to see anything through.

Myra's eyes are already closed, and she withdraws a pistol and lands three shots. One would not ordinarily shoot at an enemy that is actively wrestling with a friend, but Rostam would not be hurt by mere bullets, and maybe it would do something about the Shard.

Meanwhile, Su-Cheol is not very impressed by the smoke. He is Whistleblowing, and Whistleblowing unearths buried injustices, and currently any injustices are being obscured by the smoke. He pushes outwards with his power, and the smoke reluctantly withdraws.

The Shard finally claws his way free of Rostam - mere lungs and skull perforated, certainly, but still held together by force of will - and lands with a _whumf_ directly next to Jessie. Jessie whirls around and kicks him, one, two, three, and his head falls off.

Suddenly there are a thousand fragments of metal whistling through the air. Jessie backflips over the volleys handily. Myra flattens herself to the floor and escapes with great gashes torn in her backpack, but nothing else. Su-Cheol bears the brunt of the assault, and hisses at the pain, but nothing hits an artery. Rostam looks at the shattered bits of metal blanketing the floor. Meanwhile, the Shard deflates like a shredded balloon, leaving a pile of fabric scraps and a business card.

Su-Cheol picks up the card, reads it, and nods. "I guess we have our answer.”

* * *

Jessie Durante has a favorite old beat-up RV. She has driven it many millions of miles, up and down the Ash, through snow and sea and space, and yet it still runs just as well as it did the day it was new. It’s been modified a few times, maybe - most oil filters are not made of perpetually regenerating miraculous duckweed, and it didn’t originally come with a second floor of scrunched-up spacetime - but it’s still the same vehicle she bought when she was nineteen. She calls it the party van.

Jessie and Rostam are upstairs: Rostam on a phone call to his brother, Jessie playing 52,000-pick-up. Myra is driving. Su-Cheol is sitting in the front passenger seat, repairing Myra’s backpack with a large curved sewing needle.

“Penny for your thoughts?” asks Su-Cheol.

“Probably shouldn't've spent quite so much energy on shooting him properly, considering he ended up poking himself full of holes anyway,” replies Myra. “But it's a bit late for regrets. Any word from your contacts?”

Su-Cheol looks up from his work. His hands continue moving regardless. “I poured myself into Kaya for a bit to see if she’d gotten any tips lately.”

“...You didn’t ask her before pouring yourself into her, did you?”

“I didn’t have enough miraculous oomph to both get through the Chancel boundary and then negotiate with her for the rights to her eyeballs. Or, more likely, just not get the rights to her eyeballs and have to do it anyway. Replacing her consciousness was easier.”

“Maybe you should’ve thought of that _before_ anchoring someone who hates you.”

“Is this really the best time for this argument?” Su-Cheol puts down his work. “Are we doing this again? Seriously?”

“Has there ever been a good time for this argument? You keep saying, oh, this isn’t a good time, or that hatred isn’t against Lord Entropy’s laws like love is, or you needed to keep an eye on her so nobody else would scoop her up, or whatever, and all I see is, you found a way to get your revenge on someone you hated and pass it off as _useful_, and -”

Su-Cheol retrieves a rat's nest of electronics from under his seat, unbuckles himself, and leaves the front cabin.

“- you’re leaving because you can’t argue with me? I’m right and you’re not even going to -”

The door slams behind him.

* * *

Corinne Idurre, Excrucian Warmain, is sitting at the shore of a lake when they find her. Not _on_ the shore, oh no, that would be an acknowledgement of the base reality they are inhabiting. But at the shore, hovering, tilted back like a lawnchair. She glances at them and languidly rolls a hand in the general direction of the four Nobles. “Is the package here?”

“Jessie is not a _package_,” growls Rostam.

“Sure, sure, whatever.” Corinne rotates herself upright, still floating. She slinks behind Jessie and whispers something into her ear.

Jessie whips around and elbows Corinne in the face. Her arm passes through the Excrucian’s smiling form like a knife through mist. Jessie almost stumbles, but regains balance too fast for anyone to notice. “What was that for?” yells Jessie.

“What, did you think I was actually here? Nah.” Corinne starts... pacing? Floating back and forth? Something like that. Her feet slide above the floor. “You know how this goes, right?”

“Can we please just get this over with?” Jessie is pleading. “What else do I need to do?”

“Are you serious? You’re _Defiance_. How can you give up before it’s even begun?”

“What do you mean it hasn’t even begun? You’ve been telling me for months to come alone, that I can’t ask for help, the only reason I’m here with anyone else is because they demanded to come along with me whether or not I let them -”

“You didn’t tell them not to come with you.”

“I couldn’t!”

“I would say that that makes you weak. But honestly? I expected as much.” Corinne makes a meaningful scissors motion with one hand. “If you won’t make yourself truly independent, I’ll do it for you.”

Before Jessie can say anything else, Corinne winks out of existence.

Su-Cheol slams open a laptop and types wildly. “I think I can trace her through the mystic link and see where she’s -”

Jessie sighs and turns away. “Do what you will.”

“-- got it!” Su-Cheol yells, with a fistpump. “She’s in -”

Myra is leaning over to look at Su-Cheol’s screen. “Looks like - wait, are you serious?”

“-- Locus Benathus,” Su-Cheol says.

Myra swears in fifteen different languages.

* * *

“I came from Locus Benathus,” says Myra, by way of explanation. She, Su-Cheol, and Jessie are sitting around the table in the back of the party van, with the door open so that Rostam can hear the discussion while he’s driving. “And I’d bet a million _udi_ that Corinne chose to hide out there because she thought I’d never willingly go back. She would be wrong on that count, incidentally, but only because of Jessie here.”

“I was considering just taking her offer, to protect everyone else,” says Jessie. “But I’m pretty sure she’d just move on to the rest of you after dismantling me.”

Su-Cheol is still deeply absorbed in his laptop. “Well, whistleblowing only even makes sense as a concept after you deeply embed yourself into the social fabric, so I don’t think she’d be nearly as interested in -”

Myra cuts off Su-Cheol with a hand motion. She looks at Jessie Durante, Lady of Defiance, currently slumped over the table. “Jessie. Think about what you just said. Why would you need to be protecting us?”

“Because otherwise nobody else would be - wait a moment.” Jessie looks up. “Is this one of those influence things you were talking about?”

Myra nods. “Go on.”

“There was an unexamined assumption in there. That if I didn't do something it would never happen.” Jessie props herself up on one elbow. “Now that I put it that way it sounds silly.”

Myra's eyes are smiling. “Attagirl. Now, game plans. The only way out of Locus Benathus is across the rooftops of the highest skyscrapers. How would we extract if things went badly? Can we take the van?”

“It would be pretty difficult to get this thing up a few hundred sets of stairs. Rostam could carry it up, or throw it. I could... no, they haven't finished assembling the props, I’d need a really big ramp to get it airborne...”

* * *

Locus Benathus is crammed with skyscrapers and blanketed in deep gray smog. The cars are identical and sterile and gray. The people largely sleepwalk through life, a cargo-cult replica of a society: there is enough food for everyone, but they exchange chits and tokens for it anyway; there is enough space for everyone, but they enter lotteries for apartments anyway; there is enough time for everything, but they follow schedules anyway.

There are a small fraction of young people who notice the banal pointlessness of it all, and they instinctively gather on the roofs of buildings. The Light Magister Benathus forces them to rise, like the scum on a pot of beefstock, and this process removes impurities and societal unrest. Most members of the child-gangs spend a few years running the rooftops, and eventually return to the orderly society below. A few escape to the outside world - for the entrances and exits of Locus Benathus are all located on the tips and spires of the highest buildings. Anyone who attempts to overturn society is quietly picked off.

There was a meeting held in Locus Benathus, many years ago. The representative of the Familia Vitex found a young woman whose heart burned with the desire to fight for justice, and the Wildlord Vitex reached across the boundaries of the world even though he should not have, and he filled her with the noble flame. She tried to destroy Locus Benathus, and was banished for it. Her name was Myra Henderson.

This is the story Myra tells them, as they drive the last few miles, and eventually park outside the main entrance to Locus Benathus.

* * *

Myra’s memories of running the rooftops as a child serve her well here - she takes leaps, traverses utility rooms, and climbs emergency ladders with a practiced ease. Rostam follows, with a rope tied around his waist. On the far end of this safety-rope, Su-Cheol and Jessie follow with some difficulty. Despite his Nobility, Su-Cheol finds the experience of jumping across rooftops hundreds of floors above the ground to be rather disquieting, and Jessie is attempting to conserve all her miracle-energy for the fight to come. They find Corinne drifting near the highest spire in the Chancel, and gather underneath her.

“Lovely of you to join me.” Corinne turns a somersault or two before coming to a stop in front of the group. Her eyes have no whites. Comet-streaks sparkle in the depths of their darkness. “But I didn’t expect you to come here. What’s the rush?”

“I said I wanted to get this over with,” says Jessie. “The sooner you start this Test, the sooner we can both be finished with it.”

Corinne tilts her head. “Oh, I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Myra.”

Myra stares at Corinne, eyes narrowed. “Am I the interesting one now? Is that how it is?”

“How about... let’s make a deal.” Corinne’s mouth stretches out into a deranged grin. “I’ll let her go and I’ll take you instead.”

“- no!” Jessie yells, but Corinne cuts her off -

“As for the rest of you... I think she would rather make this decision in private, wouldn’t she?” Corinne picks Rostam, Su-Cheol, and Jessie up by the safety rope, and punts them all towards the ground below.

Rostam manages, eventually, to skid to a stop against the side of one of the buildings. He scrambles back up the cornices to the closest rooftop, and makes a great leap onto the spire that they were just on. But Corinne, and Myra, are nowhere to be found.

* * *

The three of them go looking for the local Powers. A few well-placed questions get them to the doorstep of one Ariane Lambert, the Saint of Scheduling. As Jessie reaches for the knocker, the door swings open, and Ariane motions them in.

She’s wondering why they have all shown up for an unannounced social visit. But then they explain what happened. She stops short.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “_who_ did you say was in my Chancel?”

“A Warmain, or at least a Warmain’s projection,” says Su-Cheol. “Name of Corinne Idurre.”

“I know who the Warmain is. Who did you bring with you?”

“What, Myra?” Su-Cheol stares Ariane down. “Look, I know that you’re worried about what she did before. I wouldn’t’ve gone along with this if she intended destruction.”

“And how, pray tell, would you know if she intended destruction? Even as a mortal she was already developing the rudiments of the Blind Lie. She knew exactly what to tell us to get us to look the other way.” Ariane is calm and proper, but in the too-perfect way of Nobles who can make their body language imply whatever they like. Everyone involved knows she is inwardly furious. But Nobles maintain rigid forms of politeness in their interactions so as not to destroy each other, and so Ariane offers them tea, instead.

The tea is a question: do they intend to continue to stay and discuss this?

They accept the tea.

* * *

“Every Familia is joined at the heart,” says Su-Cheol, over the pot of Locus Omphalos Oolong. He spins his (currently miniaturized) metal staff around his fingers like a pen. “We are attached to each other for life, because an Imperator has shared their soul with us.”

“Do not lecture me on basic metaphysics.” Ariane twines her fingers around her cup. (Their teacups have no handles. Burnt fingers are a nonissue for Nobles.) “I know all this already. Explain why this means you can vouch for her intentions.”

“You know our reputation.” Su-Cheol does not recite their successes; they are already widely known for being one of the best Familia to call in for a straight fight. “We work together so well because we know how our siblings-caelestis will act, without even thinking, because we understand ourselves and each other so thoroughly. I know how sharp something must be before it will get through Rostam’s skin. I know when Myra removes her fingerprints. And they know why my staff is worth the years of my life that I paid for it.”

Ariane picks up a macaron. She takes a bite, chews, swallows. “Are you accusing me of negligence?”

“Look,” Su-Cheol says, “I’m not saying that you have to do this. You probably have better ways to spend your time. But I will say that, if she was lying to me, she would have to be flawless at it, for decades, never betraying a single impulse in that direction until now. That amount of effort isn’t worth it for anyone. Not even one of us Powers.”

“Also,” Jessie adds, “if anything, she avoided meeting anyone from your Familia even when it would have been necessary for business. She was afraid of what you would do to her.”

Su-Cheol smiles in Jessie's direction.

“Hm.” Ariane considers the other half of her macaron. “It is true that she has never attended a summit or ball where I was present.”

“So, as to business,” says Rostam, “did you know Corinne was here?”

“It was Lir's turn on sentry duty,” says Ariane. “He was supposed to contact me about this kind of thing. I am going to have a _word_ with him.”

* * *

After many fruitless hours of combing through Locus Benathus looking for clues, they give up and leave for the party van.

They are upstairs. Jessie is checking to make sure everything is strapped down before she drives off. Rostam is doing his daily stretches.

Su-Cheol flops down on one of the pullout beds. He closes his eyes. “Never thought I'd be so glad to see the ground be brown, before.”

Rostam arches his back, like a cat. “I could go back, if you need someone to keep looking.”

“Tomorrow I'm going to some of her favorite hideouts and leaving her some of my playing cards. She probably can't contact us, because that's how Independence goes, but she might be glad to see something from me.” Jessie sighs as she adjusts a zip-tie. “You’re welcome to come, if you want.”

Su-Cheol rolls over. “I’m staying home tomorrow, but good luck. And you did good today.”

“Thanks,” says Jessie.

Rostam gets up from his stretching. “You know you don't have to do that, right?”

“Yeah, I know, and you’d say I could throw Aspect at it and keep going indefinitely, and then I'd say that I don't have Aspect strong enough to last that long because if I slackened my focus any time after day three I’d keel over from exhaustion, and then you'd say that I could serve my Estate or my nature to get around that, and then I'd say that this is my nature and adhering to mortal needs is how I serve it.”

“Yeah, basically,” says Rostam. “But if you insist on being exhausted, at least do it well and take care of yourself.”

Su-Cheol waves a hand wearily. “Could you turn the lights off on your way out?”

* * *

There is a lighthouse in the very center of Locus Vitex, made of stone, wrapped in a spiral staircase of wax-finished oak. At the top, above the octagonal glass room and the ever-burning brazier, there is an eyrie.

The Familia, minus one, is gathered here.

“It’s relatively simple to crack a combination lock if you listen carefully to its innards clicking and sliding against each other. Even a mortal can do it. But this?” Rostam shows the others a combination lock, with the shackle twisted open by some superhuman force. The places where the fingerprints ought to be are polished blankness. “This isn’t a mortal’s doing.”

“Several of the cards I left are gone,” says Jessie. “I’d ask them where they are, but I don't want to risk Corinne following me back through the link.”

“She left a trail,” concludes Su-Cheol. “Now we follow it.”

“It could be a trap,” says Jessie. The others look at her, startled. “I mean, that’s what she would say, if she was looking at this evidence. An obvious set of clues is not her usual style.”

“Maybe she's trying to send us all the evidence she can.” Rostam puts the lock away. “She’s being forced to be independent from us, and that includes not contacting anyone for help. But she can commit errors of omission.”

Su-Cheol looks up at Rostam. “And if we meet a Shard, instead of her? Then we’ve gone on a wild goose chase and expended ourselves for a trivial victory.”

“The creation of Excrucian Shards is as costly for them as the creation of Anchors is for us, right?” Rostam cracks his knuckles. “I’d call it a chance at a significant victory.”

* * *

They follow the trail, Jessie driving the party van in silence. Rostam sits shotgun, exchanging text messages with his brother to pass the time. Su-Cheol is in the back, keeping his hands busy trying to retrieve a computer mouse from between several knotted network cables.

It isn’t the first time Su-Cheol’s seen what a Test can do to a person. Rostam keeps numerous contacts in Noble society, the Society of Flowers. These contacts have told him about - and shown him - the remnants of those who have failed Tests, broken by pain or isolation or grief. And there are stories of people who passed a Warmain's Test, who became a Warmain's true quarry, whose faces and passions and bonds were stolen and worn by the Warmain as trophies.

It’s possible, Su-Cheol thinks, that his pettiness in the case of Kaya Astela drove Myra away. Not by itself, obviously, but maybe it was the last straw.

And now Myra has regressed to who she was at the very beginning, hiding in electrical rooms, eating out of trashbins, never staying anywhere longer than a night, haunted by memories from years of being pursued. And that life would be the same as the effects of the Test of Independence: never relying on anyone else, never asking for help, never dropping by with a question for the rest of them to puzzle over, never being glad for someone to watch her back...

Jessie never saw this Myra. And Rostam, who would instinctively apply Aspect to his own thinking so that he would never have to be irrationally sad, would only be thinking about how to get her back, and not about how she must be feeling. (Which is reasonable. Thinking about how much Myra must be suffering is not useful in the current predicament.)

The Wildlord Vitex invested his soul in these four mortals because he needed a mortal’s perspective. Perhaps this originally meant “a mortal’s perspective” as in “a mortal’s ability to fight back within minutes or hours”. But in Su-Cheol’s case, beyond the petty retaliations and the small hypocrisies, this duty of care - this need to bond and understand on an instinctive level - is fundamentally part of his mortal’s perspective too.

It’s why Corinne Idurre never wanted him.

* * *

They chase everything they can find of Myra. At the end, all they have for their troubles is another calling card.

They follow it. What else is there to do?

* * *

Su-Cheol looks at the specified arena for their next fight. He is not impressed. “Why does Corinne keep doing these things in the woods?”

“Thematics, probably.” In lieu of Myra, Rostam paces out the perimeter of the campsite clearing - a gravel cul-de-sac, a trailhead, a firepit - and then settles in to keep watch.

Jessie has peeled off to park the party van far enough away that it won’t get damaged in a fight, and to tell the one other RV in the area - one full of vacationing mortals - to leave before the “shootout happens”. It takes more than a bit of convincing, but eventually she manages to shoo them away, and makes her way back to the group.

And there they wait, largely in silence, for hours. The shadows lengthen from noon to evening.

This Shard announces her presence with another alchemical vial that snaps open in the center of the clearing - this one full of mist that congeals into solidity. Su-Cheol pole-vaults onto the cloud of foam, only to sink into it. Jessie kicks and struggles, and climbs atop it before it solidifies around her legs.

Rostam has shimmied up a nearby tree. He picks up this particular Shard by the collar, punches her in the face, and throws her to the mercies of the other two Nobles below.

The Shard sticks a three-point landing in the cloud of alchemical foam, and stands atop it unimpeded. “I don't want this to be lethal. Neither do you.”

Jessie tries running, finds that she sinks into the fog-foam, and decides to try swimming front crawl instead. “Okay, and that changes matters... how?”

It is at this moment that Su-Cheol has a bit of fun with the semantics of Whistleblowing. It destabilizes the corrupt and the unworthy; he applies this property to the Shard’s surefootedness, and she promptly topples over and lands face-first.

The Shard now struggles in the foam as much as the rest of them. She splutters and spits some out. “You can try to take me down. You’d almost certainly succeed. But I will go down swinging. Or you can let me -”

Rostam swan-dives down from the tree and lands, fists first, directly on the Shard’s head. In retaliation, she forces his hands to be independent from the rest of his body. He throws his fundamental vitality into preventing them from being cut off, and ends up with useless lumps on the ends of his arms.

The Shard twists a bangle off her wrist and smashes it.

It unleashes a greater miracle of the Test of Independence.

* * *

None of them has any words to explain what happens next. Is it the teamwork that disappears? The knowledge that someone is watching your back? The duty to intervene when someone else is in danger?

Each one of them is alone in this world.

“Listen. That's all you need to do. No need to wound yourselves further now; you can do that later without penalty. Listen for a few minutes and I will release you.” The Shard clasps her hands. “I swear, upon my Harumaph and your Cneph, that that's the only thing she wants from you.”

The Shard casually dismisses the foam. She pins Su-Cheol to the ground with a chalk outline, forces Jessie onto her knees, and spits in Rostam's general direction.

Then the Shard straightens. A shadow of an expression passes over her face - and then she is nothing but eyes and a mouthpiece for Corinne.

Corinne, then, speaks to them: “...I never did tell you why I needed Independence, did I? Myra tells me that perhaps that would help sway you.”

“Myra would only say such a thing under duress,” Jessie mutters.

“Ah, but there’s where your definitions fall apart.” Corinne strolls around the clearing. “I’m not putting her under duress. I’m merely subjecting her to what I experience every day of my life.”

* * *

The trees are silent.

“Do you know why Lord Entropy forbids love?” asks Corinne.

Su-Cheol manages to pull his face out of the gravel for just long enough to spit out a retort. “Having a convenient excuse to punish whoever he wants to.”

Corinne laughs, a high, sharp sound that carries through the trees. “Of course that’s what you’d say. No, I mean the part where love is a vulnerability us Excrucians can exploit.”

“It is also our strength,” Jessie says. “We Nobles are weapons. And so we can turn the things we love into weapons, too.”

Corinne’s utter confidence slips. She looks down at her feet. “I look upon the relationships that you Nobles so cherish. I cannot have them. That way is closed to me.”

Jessie says, “So why must you take from us, instead of working on yourself?”

“Myra would work perfectly well with or without you. I...” Corinne sighs. “I need the ability to do that.”

“...but why?”

“I'm _tired_, dears. I'm tired of chopping myself up to dedicate to people who will, inevitably, leave. I'm tired of losing myself to best friends whose parents move them away, to sleepaway-camp romances, to kisses in high school closets, to chance and circumstance that gives with one hand and takes with eleven others.”

A bird unthinkingly interrupts the Warmain's monologue. In a single fluid movement, Corinne draws a bow and an arrow and shoots. As she puts her bow away, the bird is pierced through the heart. Corinne does not bother to retrieve it.

“I am not stupid. I know that, in this life, there is no way to avoid relying on others. But love tears a piece out of the soul when it is betrayed.”

Corinne looks upwards. A blanket of dusk has begun to settle over the woods.

“So I want your Familia's trust. Because trust can recover and fight another day. Love can't.”

* * *

Something of Jessie struggles free. Defiance. That’s who she is. And this is not how the story ends.

There is an agonizing moment of pins-and-needles pain, as vitality forces its way back into Jessie, and she rises. The gravel bloodies the heels of her hands, but she does not care anymore. The other things Corinne’s Shard did to her no longer matter, either.

This determination won’t last. Once she gets everyone free, her nerves will fail her. But for now...

She calls her party van. It comes barreling through the trees into the clearing. Corinne-in-the-Shard has just enough time for an unintelligible shriek before it runs her over.

Jessie uses more Defiance to yank the bindings out from around Su-Cheol. He sits up and shakes his head a few times to clear out the cobwebs.

Jessie runs over to Rostam. “We need to get out of here. Now.” Rostam stares ahead, blankly. Jessie waves her hand around in front of Rostam's face. “Is someone in there? Hello? Anyone?”

Nothing.

In desperation Jessie slaps Rostam. He falls over, rigid as a toy soldier. Jessie recoils in shock.

“His mind is elsewhere right now.” Su-Cheol picks Rostam's body up with one hand and opens the back door of the party van with the other. He slides Rostam in, and motions to Jessie. “I can explain more once we're not parked on top of a landmine.”

Jessie climbs in the back door. Su-Cheol sticks his staff behind his ear, and jogs around to start the engines.

* * *

“Astral projection,” says Su-Cheol, later. They're parked at some inconspicuous truck stop. On an alien world. Because no matter where you go, a truck stop is a truck stop. “It kicks in automatically when he hears an Excrucian start talking philosophy.”

Jessie has been carried onto the upstairs bed. Instead of having her nerves fail her by making her run screaming and never come back, she has managed to interpret it to mean that her nervous system has failed, leaving her physically helpless. Su-Cheol has dipped into some of his endless stash of tangled-up electronics to give her a thought-to-speech interface. “What for?”

“Can't be swayed by Excrucian arguments if you’re not there to perceive or comprehend them. He told me once about how this Affliction was the only thing that let him survive the wiles of the Excrucian Deceiver Dolan Serunai.”

“But if Corinne had attacked him, what would happen? Wouldn't he have no way to fight back?”

“That's the downside.” Su-Cheol shakes his head. “He’s not present anymore. They can reach through the body to find him, if they try hard enough - and he can fight that, sure - but it would take an extraordinary effort for him to come back.”

“Sounds like a raw deal.”

“This is _Rostam_ we're talking about here. As far as he's concerned, if the problem can't be punched, he has no other way to deal with it. Having a way to avoid this particular problem neatly covers one of his weaknesses.”

“Fair enough.”

“Do you mind if I leave for a bit? Mortal hobbies, and such.”

“Knock yourself out.”

Su-Cheol gets up. He pulls a blanket from a hidden drawer, covers Jessie’s unmoving form, and leaves to take a shower.

* * *

Later, on a rooftop:

“I’m not sure I can be sorry,” says Su-Cheol. It’s into a tape recorder. “But I have been incredibly hypocritical.

“The _spiritus dei_, the ennobling breath, the flame immortal: even as it exalts you, it cuts you away from who you were. I didn’t want that. I fought it every step of the way, tried to keep as much as I could. Some of the things I kept were to remind me of what I fight for. And some of the things I kept were the weaknesses of mortals.

“I told myself it was fine to continue hating you because you hated me. I told myself that it was only sensible to take advantage of that, because the War was so very dangerous, the consequences of failure so terribly high. And when I learned of the Laws of Lord Entropy, the ones that forbid the Nobilis love and shirking and unbridled vengeance, this was redoubled: you were a perfectly reasonable asset to keep, because the feeling I had for you was allowed.

“But this is the very thing that perverted my original intent: you became an asset, a weapon, something to take advantage of, someone I could manipulate. To hate a superior is an understandable impulse; to hate an inferior is petty and cruel.

“And the fact that I have abused my power is inexcusable.”

He stops the tape; removes it. He replaces it with another, and hits the record button. He is silent, for a while. The microphone picks up only the whistling of the wind.

“Kaya Astela, once of Seoul and more recently of Locus Vitex, I am cutting you free of my bindings,” he says, finally. “Do as you wish.”

He crushes a lotus leaf in one hand. He lets go, and the fragments fly away, to parts unknown.

* * *

The rolling hills of Locus Vitex sprawl out from underneath the great stone lighthouse.

Rostam has come back to himself. Jessie has been put in what is technically a mobility device; it can traverse rough terrain, is driven by thought, and holds her upright enough to converse with people, but that’s about it. Anything more useful would, apparently, require constantly actively fighting the Wound itself. (They tried.)

Rostam, fresh off another phone call to his brother, leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. “So what do we do now?”

Su-Cheol is, as usual, keeping his hands busy with one of his many electronic bird’s nests. Is that a receipt printer? “We have maybe a few days before Corinne will send us another insulting note egging us on. Or we could go take the fight to her.”

“How?” Jessie asks. “She isn’t leaving any clues anymore. My cards are gone. We could always use miracles to track her, but I don’t think it’s in-theme for any of us, so we’d have to spend a huge amount of miracle energy.”

“Actually...” Su-Cheol steeples his fingers. “I’d probably be able to bend Whistleblowing into a shape that could do that. Mind you, it’ll probably be an overreach, and some annoyed Noble of Tracking or something will come calling in a few weeks because I ‘claimed’ part of their Estate. But we need results _now_, and I’m pretty sure me-a-few-weeks-from-now would forgive me.”

“And what do you suppose we do after we find her? If she can do the Independence thing that her Shard can...” Rostam trails off.

Jessie’s voice is surprisingly faithfully reproduced - though, to the more trained of Noble ears, there are still a few audio artifacts. “We find a way to further each others’ goals without ever needing to cooperate. So long as each one of us has a different angle to attack, a plausible-feeling reason to believe that any given personal strategy would work by itself, and a personal motivation to fight her, we could get something done.”

“I don't suppose you would assign me the role of punching her?” Rostam asks.

Su-Cheol laughs. “Of course you can.”

* * *

They come upon her deep in some city's storm drains.

It is a concrete hall, pillars placed exactly in a grid, roof ten feet above. The dark stains of old floods are smeared on the floor. An extensive bout of graffiti makes some dubious claims about how the city had been moved a dozen miles south because it blocked someone's view.

Corinne is leaning against a pillar, the toes of her boots just skimming the floor. “It’s impolite to just barge in on me like that. What if I was changing?”

“If you could become a werewolf or elemental spirit you would've revealed that by now,” retorts Jessie. “That kind of thing's too useful to hide.”

Su-Cheol laughs. “If you mean it the other way, you've been wearing those rags ever since your Breakthrough, and it shows.”

Rostam is quietly working his way around the vaulted concrete hall as the others banter, earmuffs in place so he doesn't accidentally overhear any philosophizing. He drops nosegays next to every concrete pillar.

He sends a final bouquet sailing through the air. Corinne instinctively catches it. “Catchfly and Greek valerian? I'm flattered, but -”

The flowers explode.

* * *

In the split second of the explosion, Su-Cheol grabs hold of Whistleblowing and prays for aid.

The earth and paving and buildings above the storm drain come crashing down, an endless rain of steel beams and concrete. But - as Su-Cheol’s miracle adjusts reality - someone called in a credible bomb threat a few hours ago, and most of the downtown district has already been evacuated. Of course, with his focus split between casting the miracle and looking out for Corinne, he has no mindspace left to prepare a defense against the incoming falling rocks. But he’s accepted that.

Jessie, backed against a wall and encased in her wheelchair, escapes much of the damage. Sure, she’s trapped underneath a huge amount of rubble, but so is Corinne. Then again, she’s also trapped underneath a huge amount of rubble. Did Rostam overestimate how much explosive he needed to order? Or had he not accounted for the skyscrapers above, with their hundreds of floors of steel and glass?

Rostam had, of course, warned the others that something like this would happen. (“I’ve hired a flower-alchemist. Contradictory bouquets are unstable. Bundle ensnarement with rupture, add a bit of primer, and...”) Since they knew what was coming, they’d have an edge in defending against it.

..._If_ they defended against it.

“Damn it, Su-Cheol, did you try to hero again?” Rostam digs through the boulders. “Seriously?”

A defenseless body crushed under a million tons of rubble would obviously die. And this is exactly what he finds.

* * *

The plan is already spiraling out of control. With the explosion far larger than he’d planned for it to be, Su-Cheol down, Jessie trapped, and Corinne likely to reappear any minute now, Rostam considers his options.

He hears the chatter of radios and the low grumblings of armored vans, already set up despite the relatively slow speed of mortal emergency responses. Su-Cheol must have called in the mundane authorities, then. He keeps his head under, peering through a maze of broken glass shards until they happen to align into a fragmentary periscope -

Corinne hauls herself out and tries to levitate. She fails, and finds herself face to face with the sights of a hundred rifles. So she forces the local guns to be Independent of their owners. They clatter to the floor, and refuse all further attempts to retrieve them.

Police and firefighters mill uncertainly around the rubble, discombobulated by the naked miracle they just saw.  
They’re too well-trained to break and run. But miracles force mortals to confront the fact that things can happen without mundane causes, and they are wondering why their cars and clothing are suddenly talking to them. (They’ve always been talking. Beyond the strictures of prosaic reality, everything is alive. But forcing unprepared humans to face another layer of reality tends to break their minds.)

Behind Rostam, Jessie forces her way out of the rubble, using sheer strength of Defiance to ignore the fact that her mobility device is not designed to shift millions of tons of structural material.

Rostam shimmies his arm around a bent I-beam to reach the phone in his pocket. Then, gritting his teeth and straining the limits of his ability to call on his Regalia, he reaches through the screen to pull out his backup plan.

* * *

Corinne looks, if anything, yet more ragged. The reason behind her inability to levitate is now evident: her feet are being weighed down by large boulders. “Rossie!” she yells, over her shoulder, at the man approaching her from behind. “Dependence is stupid and you shouldn’t bother with it!”

He grabs her by the hand and twist-slams her on the ground.

Corinne shrieks. “I thought it’d happen again!”

Rostam’s brother dusts off his hands. “You can’t force him to astrally project if he’s already astrally projected as my spirit guide. He’s telling me, and I quote, that I can ‘ask for all the power you need to finish the job.’ So I intend to finish the job.”

Corinne is about to make another quip, when she is cut off by a loud rumbling noise. She looks down nervously.

The rubble beneath them erupts. Dust and boulders spray outwards. Corinne looks down at herself, only to find that she’s been speared through the chest by a certain arbitrarily-sized metal staff.

As Jessie could tell you, being completely physically helpless isn’t enough to stop a Noble.

Being dead isn’t enough, either.

* * *

Corinne hauls the gigantic metal rod out of herself, throwing it towards a nearby building. Su-Cheol, possessing it in spirit, collapses its size until it plinks harmlessly across the pavement.

Corinne snaps her fingers. The dust in the air is suddenly flammable. A nearby electrical line, sparking faintly, is enough to briefly envelop all the combatants - and their surroundings - in metal-melting fire.

Su-Cheol holds his staff together with raw miraculous strength. Rostam’s brother sends the fire-damage down the link to Rostam, trusting Rostam to contain and metabolize it. Jessie lets her wheelchair melt in the flame: she can't be any more physically useless than she is already.

And then the flash fire is gone, because the dust was consumed by the flame. Corinne curses. The only thing she has accomplished is burning a handful of the nearby mortals to a crisp.

Su-Cheol borrows one of the local PA systems, insinuating himself into the impossibly deep tangle of electrical wires it is attached to. “I’ve got a question for you, Corinne.”

Corinne staggers upright, the hole in her chest scabbed over with a window to the night sky. “Yeah?”

“Why is it,” asks Su-Cheol, “that when you make the choice of venue, you always drag us deep into the woods?”

“That’s a dumb question,” she says. “You’ve got machine empathy, that’s why you’re talking to me from one of those squawkboxes.”

“You know,” says Myra, from a nearby building, “if you’d bothered checking with Ariane, she would’ve told you that I am very good at lying.”

“Ariane... who?” asks Corinne.

“You know. The Saint of Scheduling. Who was in residence when you so rudely barged into Locus Benathus.”

“What? I misled her. Isn't that enough? You expect me to grill an unwilling Noble for exposition?”

Rostam, through his brother, crosses his arms. “Could’ve gotten it from her by seduction rather than force. I hear that works for Deceivers.”

Jessie takes advantage of Corinne’s distraction, and tells her playing cards to fling themselves at the Warmain. They whirl around Corinne, a tornado of suits and royalty. Corinne is mesmerized by the display. Myra takes this opportunity to clock her in the back of the head.

* * *

Su-Cheol possesses a large knot of cables nearby, trusses up Corinne, and ties her to the party van’s roof rack. Rostam wraps himself in some fireproof insulation from the ruins, and Myra hauls Jessie and Su-Cheol out on stretchers. Jessie asks the van to get them home. On the way back, Rostam stitches Su-Cheol’s spirit back into his body.

Even now, the Prosaic is papering over what happened with impersonal logic: chemical traces of more ordinary explosives, a broken gas line to explain the flash fire.

Their Imperator, Wildlord Vitex, is there to meet them as they come in. _I’ll take it from here_, he says. And he takes Corinne in two of his six hands and dives deep into the world.

(“He’s taking her,” Su-Cheol says to Jessie, “through increasing levels of abstraction, into the Spirit World, the placeless place and timeless time the Imperators are strongest in. There, they will unravel her, save what they can, and bury what they can’t.”)

And finally - _finally_ \- they are in a private room, inside their beautiful lighthouse tower. Myra hauls herself into a beanbag chair. She looks at her Familia, all of them injured but alive.

“I didn't want to hope...” Myra buries her face in her hands. “But I couldn't forget what it felt like. To be with you all.”

“May I --” says Su-Cheol, raising one arm.

Myra flings herself across the room at superhuman speed and crushes Su-Cheol in a hug.

* * *

“I thought I was protecting you,” Myra says, later. “But then she made more excuses to go after you anyway.”

The sun has set. The light atop the lighthouse swings round and round, a steady mechanical rumble.

“Remember,” Jessie says, gently, “what you asked me. Why would you need to protect us?”

“She’s - you’re - you’re _young_, I’m not, I’m better at, I can take it better -” Myra stutters and trails off.

“Jessie can more than hold her own,” Su-Cheol says. “That biggest Wound you saw, her being paralyzed? That wasn’t Corinne. That was _her_ idea. She spoke a Word of Command, pushed herself to her limits in a situation where I was still struggling to decide how to act and Rostam was out of the building.”

Myra looks at Jessie. “You shouldn’t have had to do that.”

“I signed up for this. Same as you all did. Vitex made sure.” And to make it clear she’s not open for further arguing, Jessie pulls out one of her playing cards and a permanent marker, and busies herself redrawing the face of a Queen.

Myra looks around the room, hoping for someone more receptive to her argument.

Rostam straightens from his current pose. “No, I’m not going to help you beat yourself up,” he says, then folds into his next one.

* * *

Myra lies on the roof of the lighthouse with Su-Cheol. “You know what tipped the scales for me? What made me finally decide to come back? I found the audiotape you recorded for Kaya.”

Su-Cheol looks up at the sky of Locus Vitex, their home. It is a perfect, starless midnight blue. “...The one where I dismissed her?”

“No. The one where you went on for a while about how you were wrong to continue to hate her.”

Su-Cheol rolls over and props himself up on one arm to look at Myra. “I thought I threw that one away.”

Myra laughs. “I know how to dumpster-dive.”

“How’d you know which one to - wait, you were following me, weren’t you?”

“Nice deduction.” Myra snaps her fingers. “Speaking of which, you ever thought about why Corinne liked dragging us into the woods?”

“No? I had more important things to think about. Like finding you.”

“She was obsessed with the myth of the independent survivalist,” Myra says. “That dream of running away to a cabin in the woods and becoming a homesteader, with your little farm and your little plot of land and the forest around it. But there’s just one problem with that myth.”

Su-Cheol looks down at the hills below. Beams of light sweep across them as the lighthouse’s mirrors turn. “Yeah?”

“You’re still relying on the forest.”

* * *

There is a war. Sometimes, it’s about whether concepts deserve to exist. Other times, it’s about struggling with the contradictions of the world. Or figuring out where one idea stops and another begins.

And sometimes it’s about how love, trust, and interdependence aren’t so different after all.

**Author's Note:**

> This is only one way to structure a game of Nobilis. There are many other premises in this setting. For example, instead of a Familia, you could play as some of the Falling Stars - Nobles bound to the duty of responding to Excrucian breakthroughs as repentance for previous deeds. Or your opponent (for a certain value of “opponent”) might be a Mimic Imperator, an Excrucian construct stitched together out of fragments of dead Imperators as a Trojan-horse attack on Creation. Or you could focus on the internecine politics of Noble society itself, rather than any outside threat.
> 
> As I noted at the beginning, there are many other subsystems that I have not even tried to demonstrate. The Nobilis sourcebook describes them. Likewise, the book also has a much larger setting, most of which I have not used.
> 
> Corinne has a Gift that lets her do Lesser Motions of Mist. But only Lesser Motions of Mist. Lesser Motions recontextualize: they let her transform mist into other diffuse things like foam, rocket-impulse, or impossibly opaque shrouds. The purpose of the vials she keeps bringing and breaking is so that she can introduce enough mist into the surroundings to be able to do this, since she does not have the ability to create or summon it.
> 
> Nobilis 2nd edition is a beautiful book, but the rules are eclipsed by the purple prose. If you want a playable game, get 3rd edition.
> 
> At the time of writing this, the legal licensing and copyright situation of the Nobilis 3rd edition book are tangled and dubious; the publisher ran off with all the money from Jenna Moran's other project (Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine), went out of business, and left her holding the bag. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, all purchases of Nobilis 3rd edition still go to said publisher’s bank account and she hasn’t figured out how to get it back. In any other situation I would not recommend legally dubious sources, but I cannot in good conscience sanction paying the remains of that publisher another cent. Go look at [Jenna Moran’s tumblr](https://jennamoran.tumblr.com/) for details on how to support her instead.


End file.
